Michelle Weemaes

I've been in higher education for 23 years, working as a program coordinator for an ultrasound program and recently achieving the rank of full professor in 2025, which was not easy. Before transitioning to academia, I was an ultrasound technician and technical director for a vascular surgeon group. Even in that role, I found myself spending my lunch times with a whiteboard teaching physics to students because I really enjoyed it. Teaching was my favorite part, while the budgets and administrative work of being a technical director weren't as fulfilling. When I saw a posting from Ferris, my alma mater, looking for someone to teach, I jumped at the opportunity because I just wanted to focus on teaching. I teach abdomen, OBGYN, and all the physics courses here, along with a little bit of everything else. My typical day involves teaching labs in the mornings when our students haven't eaten yet so they don't have gas in their bodies, then lectures in the afternoon, followed by office hours and committee work. There's a lot of committee work for a professor. The biggest challenges I face are the students changing over the years and trying to meet their needs where they are. COVID changed a lot of things, including how we teach, and students' perspectives and how they learn have changed, so I'm constantly working to keep up with all that.